Author Archives: disinterested spectator

An Unfair Conversation

Here we go again, people calling for us to have a conversation about race.  But I think it is time to have a conversation about having a conversation.  Last year, when Starbucks urged its customers to engage in a discussion of race relations while waiting to be served their first cup of coffee, they pushed the idea to the point that people were making jokes about it, and soon the policy was abandoned.  Most of the time, the need for such a conversation is expressed in a general way, it being left to our imagination about when, where, and with whom that conversation would take place.  By filling in the specific details, Starbucks provided us with more of an occasion for laughter than conversation.

Of course, race is not the only thing we are enjoined to have a conversation about, but it is the subject most often said to be in need of such.  Whatever the subject, though, I still have not quite figured out what that conversation is supposed to sound like, or what it is expected to accomplish.  In a way, this talk about the need to have a conversation is akin to the older notion about the need to communicate.  Unfortunately, people often communicate perfectly well, and then find that they just don’t like what they hear.  It is not that people fail to communicate in such circumstances; it’s that they avoid communicating because they do not want to have an argument.  Those who persist in calling for communication, on the other hand, often have a built-in expectation of agreement and capitulation that is not realistic.  In a similar way, people calling for a conversation about race assume that the conversation will not consist of anything that is politically incorrect, insensitive, or hateful. And as we have seen, people can be expelled from school or lose their job if caught expressing the wrong views on this issue.

Now, this is not a problem for egalitarians.  They believe that all races are equal, especially since they believe race is just a social construct anyway. They love their fellow man, and just don’t understand why we cannot all get along. I suppose these egalitarians can talk to one another and have that conversation, patting themselves on the back for their enlightened views. Other than making themselves feel good, however, I don’t see what that would accomplish.

Then there are those who are racists.  Some racists are filled with hate, detesting those who are different.  Others do not hate, but merely despise, regarding some races as being mentally and morally inferior to their own. Others still merely have an aversion to those who are different, so that they do not wish to socialize with other races, and certainly do not want to marry them.  Finally, there are secondary racists, people who fear the racism of others, and therefore prefer to live in a neighborhood or go to a school where their race predominates, rather than in a neighborhood or school where they stand out as different, perhaps making themselves an object of racial hatred. Racists can and do have conversations about race, but I don’t think they are the sort that those calling for a conversation have in mind.

Most racists keep their views to themselves in mixed company.  By “mixed,” I mean not only when they are around people of a different race, but also when around those who are egalitarians.  Of course, some racists are bellicose in nature and will not hesitate to express their views regardless of the situation, relishing the opportunity to vent their spleen.  But most will be circumspect, waiting until they get a sense of those they do not know very well before expressing their true feelings.

Although some may find this incongruous, a lot of racists are too polite to let on, if they think there is a chance that they might give offense.  Around people of another race or around egalitarians of the same race, they will avoid a conversation about race as much as possible. In a pinch, they will lie, for they know what is expected of them.  In short, a conversation between egalitarians and racists will either be quite hostile and vehement, if the racist does not care about being rude, or, as is more often the case, it will be hypocritical and disingenuous.  Polite racists will feign a politically correct attitude and then change the subject.  As a result, conversations about race will not accomplish anything in these situations either.

This leads to an asymmetrical situation.  Those who call for a conversation about race are invariably egalitarians.  They are comfortable in doing so, because their views on the subject are laudable, and they can simply speak their mind without fear of censure.  Polite racists, on the other hand, never call for such a conversation, because they dread having to feign beliefs they do not have.  They can fake it for a minute or two, but a long, drawn out conversation on race will simply wear them out and increase their chance of making a slip.

Perhaps those calling for a conversation suppose that if racists are forced to have conversations with egalitarians, they will eventually succumb.  Just as getting people to say the Lord’s Prayer in church might be thought to instill religious belief, or getting people to say the Pledge of Allegiance might be thought to instill a sense of patriotism, so too might it be supposed that getting people to say the right things about race will instill the proper egalitarian attitude.

But as noted above, such a conversation is unfair to racists.  Therefore, instead of calling for a conversation, which requires racists to be adept in saying what is required of them in different contexts and circumstances, we might instead call for the Oath of Equality, in which everyone recites a rote speech about how everyone is created equal regardless of race, and that everyone should be treated equally, and so on.

Now, just as no atheist ever became a Christian by repeatedly citing the Lord’s Prayer, and no traitor ever became a patriot by saying the Pledge of Allegiance, so too will no racist ever be converted to egalitarianism by saying the Oath of Equality.  But then, no conversation is going to change a racist’s views either. At least the Oath of Equality will be less of a burden on the racist, something he can recite with indifference.

By this time it may be wondered why I am being so solicitous as to the plight of the racist. Though not a racist myself, yet I feel their pain.  After all, racism is not a matter of choice.  By virtue of some combination of genetic predisposition and environmental influence, their prejudice and bigotry is a fact of their character from which no exercise of free will can liberate them. Their need to dissemble requires that they not be taxed with a long conversation about race that can only lead to their being outed in spite of themselves.

The proposed Oath of Equality is a reasonable compromise.  It will allow the racist to say the proper thing when called for, without creating for him the undue burden that a conversation would entail, and without putting him at risk for being found out or of inadvertently hurting the feelings of others.

Dark City (1950)

How many songs does a movie have to have to be a musical?

Before going any further with that question, we need to make a distinction between expressionistic musicals like My Fair Lady (1964) or Grease (1978) and backstage musicals like Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933) or New York, New York (1977).  In the former, it is sometimes said, somewhat derisively, that people are just walking down the street and then break out into song, accompanied by a disembodied orchestra.  In the latter, the singing and dancing occurs during rehearsals or on stage during a performance.  In other words, it is realistic, something you might actually see and hear in real life.  Actually, Busby Berkeley musicals are not realistic in the sense that the numbers could never be performed on a real stage, but they are more realistic than expressionistic musicals.

Dark City is certainly not an expressionistic musical.  But does it qualify as a backstage musical?  Early in the movie, we see Fran (Lizabeth Scott) singing a song in a nightclub.  I thought to myself, her singing sounds fine to me, but I suspect a lot of people would say that she cannot sing, although I understand that the singing was dubbed anyway.  But then, I further reflected, I don’t have a good ear, so who am I to judge?

After she finishes her song, Danny (Charlton Heston), her boyfriend, tells her he liked her song, to which she replies, “Aren’t we a pair?  I can’t sing and you don’t have a good ear.”  That took me back a little.

Anyway, I mused that even though the movie had a song in it, it was not a musical, because one song does not a musical make.  But then she sang another song, and another, and another, until she sang five in all.  Still, the movie did not seem to me to be a musical, and it would not have been, even if they had managed to squeeze one more number into it.  Moreover, just to get an objective assessment, I checked Internet Movie Database and Netflix, and neither of them classified it as a musical, but only as a crime drama or film noir.

In reflecting on why this was so, I thought back on that earlier comment by her that she could not sing, followed later by another remark to the effect that singing in a nightclub was just a way of making a living, something she would gladly give up if Danny would marry her.  And that must be the key.  In the typical backstage musical, the main performers are ambitious, just waiting for their chance to take the spotlight and become a star.  Or, as in a Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland movie, where Rooney gets the idea of putting on a show to save whatever it is that needs saving in that movie, the success of the show is what matters.  In other words, in a backstage musical, it is not a question of how much singing and dancing there is, but whether the plot centers around the performers qua performers, their individual success or the success of the show as a whole.

In Dark City, on the other hand, the plot centers around people that are not performing musical numbers.  Rather, Danny is a bookie who has been put out of business by too many raids and is looking for a bankroll so he can move to another town.  He and his pals get a sucker into a poker game and take him for all his money.  The sucker is devastated and commits suicide.  Now the police are investigating the situation and the sucker’s brother is out to kill everyone that was in the game.  As a result, the songs Fran sings are just fillers, which actually have the effect of slowing the movie down.

As a crime drama, the movie is mediocre, but as an illustration of the fact that a backstage musical must be more than just a bunch of musical numbers, this movie is instructive.

The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933)

Sometimes a book or a movie gets more praise than it deserves because it was banned somewhere.  And what could be better for a movie than to have been banned by Joseph Goebbels himself, the Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany!  Other than that, there is no explanation for why anyone thinks this movie is any good.

If Dr. Mabuse:  The Gambler (1922) was over the top, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse is absurd.  The title character went insane in the first movie and was confined to an insane asylum.  Then, Hofmeister, a criminal who once was a police detective, but was cashiered for bribery, goes mad out of fear of Dr. Mabuse.  By the end of the movie, Dr. Baum, who runs the asylum, goes mad as well and has to be confined.  But it does not stop there.  The plot is so outrageous as to make one think the movie itself was produced by a madman.

For starters, while Dr. Mabuse is in the insane asylum, he still manages to run a criminal organization, planning crimes down to the last detail.  His motives are as mad as he is.  Whereas in the first movie, he simply wanted power and the pleasure of manipulating the lives of others, in this movie he wants to drive the whole world mad by getting people hooked on drugs, which he supplies for free, and by causing so much terror and destruction that civilization will collapse, leaving nothing behind but crime as a way of life.

Mabuse communicates with his henchmen by willing his thoughts onto a record, which plays when he so wills it, while a cardboard image of himself sits behind a curtain, casting a shadow.  Do you dare ask how this curtain, cardboard image, and record player came to be set up in this room where criminals go to get their orders when commanded to do so by a piece paper with a typewritten message on it?  Why, Mabuse just wills it all into place!

Things get a little easier for Mabuse when he dies and wills his spirit into Dr. Baum, so now he has another body to occupy that can leave the asylum.  But he loves the record gimmick so much that when Dr. Baum wants his servant to think he is in his quarters, the record player is turned on whenever someone wiggles the door handle, causing it to play the message, “I don’t wish to be disturbed.”

Kent, a man who killed his girlfriend and her lover and went to prison for it, is forced by economic circumstances into Mabuse’s criminal organization.  Together with Lilli, the woman he loves, he decides to go straight.  But before he can make it to the police station, he and Lilli are captured and brought to the room with the curtain, the cardboard image, and the record player.  After the door is locked behind them, the record tells them they will never leave the room alive.  Eventually, Kent and Lilli pull back the curtain and discover the setup.  Then they hear ticking, the sound of a time bomb.  What better way to have a couple of people killed than to blow up your own headquarters!  But when you can will yourself into another body, will your thoughts onto a record, will your thoughts through a typewriter onto a piece of paper, and will an entire setup consisting of record player, curtain, and cardboard image, and finally will a time bomb into existence as well, then I suppose it is child’s play to will the whole setup into existence somewhere else after you destroy it with that time bomb just to kill two people.

But all is not lost.  We can just say to ourselves that this movie was an attempt by Fritz Lang to warn us of the danger of Adolf Hitler and that will make the movie profound somehow.

Dr. Mabuse:  The Gambler (1922)

At its longest running time, Dr. Mabuse:  The Gambler is almost five hours long, and it really overstays its welcome.  Long movies should be epics, spanning many years, accompanied by stirring music.  This movie is just a crime drama taking place over a matter of weeks, perhaps months.  It might have been more palatable had it been presented today as a television series, divided into weekly segments of forty minutes each, allowing for commercials, but just barely.

When the movie begins, our credulity is strained by the elaborate conspiratorial network that has been set up to do what could have been done in a simple, straightforward manner.  For example, when Dr. Mabuse (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), the mastermind of a criminal organization, wants to meet secretly with one of his henchmen, does he just have the guy come over to his apartment where they can talk in private?  It would seem reasonable enough, inasmuch as Mabuse’s henchmen can often be found at his apartment where he gives them instructions.  But no!  Mabuse puts on a disguise and pretends to have an automobile accident with his henchman, who then offers his car to Dr. Mabuse, as if he is just giving him a lift out of courtesy.  Inside the car, Mabuse then gives his henchman the secret instructions.  And how did they arrange to have this accident at just that time and at just that intersection, you ask?  Why, they probably discussed it over at Mabuse’s apartment the day before.

The point of the secret meeting in the automobile has to do with the creation of a panic in the stock market concerning a stolen trading agreement between nations, allowing Mabuse, in disguise, of course, to sell high and then buy back low when the trading agreement is found, still sealed, just as Mabuse planned.  That might have been interesting, had not the whole thing been rendered silly by the automobile accident nonsense.

Before going over to the stock exchange, Mabuse, in another disguise, goes over to a secret apartment where he has a counterfeiting operation going on.  Does he keep the key in his apartment until he needs it?  Of course not.  He has a woman sit outside the apartment with the key hidden in a ball of twine, which he extracts when he wants to go inside.  Once in the apartment, we find five blind men counting the counterfeit money and putting it in bundles.  Presumably, all the bills are of the same denomination.  They are never allowed to leave the place, and since they are blind, they don’t know who it is that runs the operation.  We never see the money being printed, just counted.  Perhaps it is being printed in another room by five deaf men who cannot hear Mabuse’s voice and thus do not know who runs the operation.

You might think that between these market manipulations and counterfeiting operations, Mabuse has all the money he needs, but as we later find out, money is not Mabuse’s ultimate motive.  He does not want money so that he can live in comfort and luxury.  In fact, he cares nothing about happiness, and indeed, his moods range from morose to grouchy to angry.  What he wants is power, of which he can never get enough.  Money is simply one manifestation of his power.  Another is his ability to manipulate people.  Finally, toward the end, he says he regards himself as a state within a state, with which he is at war.

Regarding his desire to manipulate people, we discover a new aspect of the movie that makes the counterfeiting and stock market machinations almost seem realistic by comparison.  It turns out that he has mesmeric powers so great that he can compel people to do things from across the room simply by concentrating his gaze.  Such are his powers that he compels several people to commit or attempt suicide.  Also, his mental powers enable him to create illusions.  In one case, in a different disguise, he puts on a performance displaying such skills, which includes making the entire audience see people emerge from a desert and enter into the aisle, only to vanish before their eyes.  I found myself saying, “Mabuse gestures hypnotically,” in allusion to Mandrake, the Magician, a comic strip I never cared for.

At one point in the movie, another motive arises for Mabuse, lust for Countess Told.  He kidnaps her and takes her to his apartment, but she keeps refusing his advances, saying she wants to return to her husband.  As an act of revenge, Mabuse compels her husband, Count Told, to slit his throat with a razor.  Why Mabuse didn’t just use his mesmeric powers to make the Countess get naked and hop in bed, I don’t know.

Prosecutor von Wenk finally figures out that Mabuse is the evil super villain behind all the bad things that have been happening.  He gets an armed force together to arrest him, leading to a big shootout.  But it doesn’t make sense that Mabuse would resist being arrested, because he could mesmerically compel the judge and jury to find him innocent, or, in a pinch, compel the guard to open the prison doors and let him go.  And then he could gesture hypnotically to make it appear that that he was still in his cell.

I guess the people who made this movie realized that Mabuse’s powers could exceed any brought against him by the state, so they stooped to a deus ex machina.  They made Mabuse go mad, seeing ghosts of those whose deaths he was responsible for.  Reduced to a blithering loony, he is carted off to jail, or, as we find out in the sequel, to an insane asylum.

The Next Voice You Hear… (1950)

In the movie The Next Voice You Hear…, a mysterious voice interrupts the normal broadcast on the radio, claiming to be God.  This happens in Los Angeles every night at 8:30 for six straight days.  People also hear the voice all over the world in whatever language they speak.  Of course, it is a little more convenient for people in Los Angeles to listen to the broadcast, whereas for people in the other parts of the world, not so much.  Those in London must have had to get their butts out of bed at 4:30 in the morning if they wanted to hear what God had to say.  Those of us watching the movie don’t get to hear what God says at all.  We only hear what others say he said.  But that’s all right.  I’ve only heard what others say God said for years.

The effect that God’s voice on the radio has on people is mainly illustrated by the Smith family.  That would be Joe Smith (James Whitmore), his wife Mary (Nancy Davis), their son Johnny, and Aunt Ethel, who visits occasionally to help out because Mary is about to have a baby.  Of course, “Joe” suggests the name “Joseph,” so I guess we are supposed to see some connection with the parents of Jesus, but I have no idea why.

Family life in the Smith household is a bit irritating, primarily because Joe is bossy and thinks he knows what is best for everyone.  We are supposed to believe they basically all love one another, but watching the way they interact is an overall unpleasant experience.  In fact, Joe is no better when he leaves the house.  He is rude to others on the road, and the way he drives gets him a couple of tickets from a policeman.  At work he always seems to be at odds with the foreman, Fred Brannan (Art Smith).

On the first night that God speaks, Joe is the only one in the family to hear him.  He tells Mary and Johnny about it.  Johnny suggests it might be his friend Eddie Boyle, who has a ham radio, and that maybe he figured out a way to cut in as a prank. Joe says that is ridiculous.  “Would Eddie Boyle’s voice sound like God?”  Johnny answers, “I don’t know.  I never heard God.”  Mary turns to Johnny and says, “That isn’t nice.”

Just before that, Mary had suggested that the voice claiming to be God was part of a mystery contest or maybe an Orson Welles thing, alluding, of course, to that infamous War of the Worlds broadcast that made people believe the Martians had landed.  In other words, it was all right for her to question whether the voice was actually God, but not for Johnny to say, “I never heard God.”  And we do sense there is a difference.  Mary is only questioning whether someone claiming to be God actually is God.  But Johnny’s saying, “I never heard God,” is a little like saying, “I never saw God,” which is just one step removed from saying, “What evidence do we have that there is a God?”  Therefore, it is important for Mom to snuff out little Johnny’s tendency to think critically before it grows into full-fledged atheism.

And that does seem to be what God is worried about.  He is concerned that some people do not believe he exists or that it is really God’s voice they are hearing on the radio.  They want him to perform some miracles as proof.  God says he’ll have to think about that.

This second broadcast begins to make the members of the Smith household fearful.  Johnny even starts worrying about his mother dying while giving birth on account of overhearing Mary talking to Aunt Ethel about the difficulties in having a second child, after which Mary starts crying.  This is an artificial fear, one completely made up for this movie.  Except in special cases where there are complications, a second pregnancy is not more dangerous than the first.  The purpose of this phony danger is to give the Smith family something to be fearful of without making the audience fearful.  No one has ever watched this movie and worried that Mary was going to die.

In addition to that fear, one of the men Joe works with is worried about the miracles that God was talking about.  Also, Johnny accidentally ruins the plug on the radio cord and is afraid to tell his father.  Mary expresses surprise, saying that Johnny was never afraid to tell them about stuff like that before.  Exactly what the connection is supposed to be between all this fear and the voice of God is not made clear.  Maybe it is that people often believe in God because they are afraid, and then they end up being afraid of the very God they turned to on account of their fears.  So, fear is both the cause and the effect of believing in God, the one reinforcing the other.

On the third night, Joe and his family miss the broadcast because of the broken plug, but once the plug is fixed, the radio announcer says they were unable to record the voice.  However, they read a transcript of what God had to say.  God is not only still bothered by all the doubt and skepticism about him, but also all the fear that people are feeling.  Maybe, God muses, people are afraid there will be another forty days and nights of rain.  Minutes later, it starts to rain, accompanied by lightning and thunder.  Johnny says he is afraid, Mary screams, and a fearful Joe tries to reassure them that it is just a coincidence as they huddle in terror.  But it only rains that night, and everyone wakes up relieved to see that God didn’t keep it going for the remaining forty days and thirty-nine nights.

At work, Joe marvels that he didn’t have trouble starting his car that morning, almost suggesting that it is some kind of miracle.  But one of his coworkers tells him that maybe he has been flooding his engine every morning on account of being so uptight, and when he woke up in a good mood that morning, he was easier on the gas and didn’t flood the engine.  Joe has a revelation.  Maybe that’s what God is trying to tell everyone, to just take it easy.

Just as the next night’s broadcast is starting, Mary goes into a false labor, so they miss God.  But the radio announcer reads the transcript later, in which God claims that when he made it rain the previous night, that was a miracle.  In fact, every drop of rain, every snowflake, blade of grass, the sun, the moon, and so forth is a miracle.  Then God enjoins people to perform miracles of their own through understanding, peace, and loving kindness.

Let’s pause here to see what all this is about.  Essentially, the focus of this movie is the discord and anxieties that plague the typical American family, both within, the way they get on one another’s nerves, and without, the way they yell at other people on the road as they drive to work, and the way they grumble about their boss when they are on the job.  You might think God would be telling people to quit fighting wars and to help the starving people of Africa, but this movie is not concerned with people in war-torn countries or people who don’t have enough to eat.  Those people aren’t going to be able to buy movie tickets anyway.  No, this movie is directed at the typical theater patron, the person who lives in a peaceful community where everyone has plenty to eat.  And thus, save for the possibility of death, exemplified by the risk involved when Mary has the baby, all the evils besetting these people are the little frustrations and apprehensions of a domestic life in middle-class America.

Anyway, Aunt Ethel becomes hysterical.  Notwithstanding the benign message from the voice on the radio, she fears the wrath of an angry God bent on punishing all of us sinners.  She says her mother and her sister (i.e., Mary’s grandmother and mother) both died when they had their second baby, and now God will see to it that Mary dies when she goes into labor as well.  Joe becomes angry and starts shaking Aunt Ethel violently, causing Mary to start yelling at Joe.

The next morning, with Mary still seething over Joe’s physical abuse of Ethel, Joe leaves the house for some cigarettes.  He walks by Brannan’s house and asks him what he thinks of the voice on the radio.  Brannan says, “People silly enough to believe in God are silly enough to believe God’s talking on the radio.”  Joe tells him he has no right to say that, and Brannan reminds him it’s a free country.  Joe tells Brannan he is a mean, miserable, old man.  Brannan says that Joe is the one who is miserable:  “Posing as a God fearing man.  You’re just hanging around, praying that I’ll die so you can get my job.”  Joe pretty much admits that is true.  Brannan then says that if God wants to answer Joe’s prayers and cause him to die, he can do it right now.  Joe stares at him, almost wondering if a bolt of lightning will strike any minute.  But of course it doesn’t.  Brannan is a typical movie atheist.  Not only is he cynical, but he is grumpy and something of a misanthrope as well.  At the time this movie was made, it was commonly believed that without God a person would naturally be selfish and mean.

Joe continues on his way to the local bar to get his pack of cigarettes.  When he gets there, he is spotted by his old Navy buddy, Mitch.  Mitch is still a bachelor and is on shore leave with a big wad of cash to spend, in contrast to Joe, who complains that he struggles to make ends meet and that his son Johnny has to have a paper route to buy his own bicycle because Joe can’t afford to buy him one himself.  Mitch is a hedonist.  He tells Joe about all the pleasures of visiting far off places, especially the ones in the tropics.  Unlike Brannan, the grumpy atheist, Mitch is just having too much fun living to worry about God one way or the other.  He laughs at the way people are afraid of living and scared of dying, at the way they are afraid when God speaks to them, and they are afraid when he doesn’t.  It’s because they are afraid that they fight with each other.  “As for me,” he says, “I don’t fight with nobody.  I’m just a hundred and ninety-five pounds of true love for my fellow man.”  They sit at a table getting drunk, with Mitch more than happy to pay for all the drinks.  At one point, when he orders another round, a woman sitting at the bar catches his eye, and he orders a drink for her too, after which she sits down at their table.  She flirts with Joe, but he keeps being rude to her, even though he keeps saying, “No offense.”  Finally, he tells Mitch that he is the voice of evil and that he never wants to see him again, threatening to squash his face if he does.

It might seem a little much for Joe to say that Mitch is the voice of evil and to express his hatred for him.  After all, it is not as though Mitch has ever done anything truly evil, like kill a man or rape a woman.  He’s just a good-time Charley who wants to see everyone get drunk and get laid.  But Mitch’s role as someone who is evil is relative to the focus of this movie, which is the ordinary life of middle-class America.  Just as God is mostly addressing his remarks to families dealing with the miseries of domesticity, so too is Mitch, as the Devil’s spokesman, being evil in making Joe discontented with having a family and a boring job.

Joe comes home drunk.  Mary reads him what God said while he was out, something about not doing what he told them, about not creating miracles through love and understanding, much in the way schoolchildren fail to do their homework.  Everyone makes up, even Joe and Aunt Ethel, except for Johnny, who was so upset by what Joe did that he ran away from home.  Joe goes out looking for him and finally finds him at Brannan’s house, where it turns out that Brannan and Johnny have been friends for some time.

It cannot go without mentioning that times have changed.  For a child to have been spending time in an old man’s house without his parents knowing about it would be a matter of concern today.  But no one worried about such things in 1950 when this movie was made.  Anyway, what is strange is that we are now finding out that Brannan is a really nice man.  This contradicts the impression we had of him before as the stereotypical atheist who only cares about himself.  Furthermore, when Joe gets ready to take Johnny home, he says, “God bless you,” to Brannan, who in turn says, “God bless you, Joe.”  This is the movie’s way of saying that Brannan really does believe in God deep in his heart, which is why he is also a nice guy deep down.

As we learned from Ludwig Feuerbach, talking about God is an indirect way of talking about man.  The God on the radio is worried about all the skepticism concerning his existence.  In Feuerbachian terms, this means that the people who made this movie, as well as much of the audience for whom it was intended, were worried about all the doubts concerning God’s existence, which in turn caused them to have doubts as well.  The movie wishes to reassure us that such doubts are not real, that skepticism is just a pose, because there really is no such thing as an atheist.  Therefore, notwithstanding the appearances, everyone really believes in God.

Joe brings Johnny home, the family is all together again, and they all love one another.  Ethel has written down what God said, which is that he is pleased.  Joe even decides to say grace, which has not been a custom in that house for some time.  The next day, everyone is in church to hear the night’s broadcast, but there is only silence.  The preacher turns off the radio, saying that God has spoken for six days straight, and that since this is the seventh day, God is resting.

Interestingly, this seventh day is a Monday.  So, God rests on Monday now?  Did he take an extra day off somewhere along the way since the Creation?  No, of course not.  Making Monday the seventh day is a way of finessing the question as to which religion God belongs to.  In other words, if the seventh day had been Sunday, the implication would have been that Christianity is the true religion; if the seventh day had been on a Saturday, that would have implied that the true religion is Judaism; and while I doubt that anyone was thinking about Muslims at the time, their Day of Prayer, a Sabbath of sorts, falls on a Friday.  On the other hand, the movie begins with a quotation from the Old Testament about how the word of God had not yet been heard, and it ends with a quotation from the New Testament about how the word of God had been heard, so there does seem to be a bias toward Christianity anyway.

Right there in church, Mary goes into labor.  They get her to the hospital, and in the waiting room where Joe and Johnny sit, we see a picture of a stork on the wall, with the words at the bottom saying, “I’ve never lost a father yet.”  That’s an old joke, of course, and its purpose has always been to make light of a father’s worries and concerns about his wife’s pregnancy.  Indeed, we never really did believe that Mary was in danger of dying while giving birth, that bit about the danger of a second pregnancy notwithstanding.

Had this been a different kind of movie, Mary would have died, and we would have heard that her death is a test of our faith or that we just cannot understand the mysterious ways of God.  But the moral of this movie is that middle-class Americans should not be fearful, for there is nothing to be afraid of, which absolutely precluded the death of Mary or her baby.

The Wall Is Dead

I have been wanting a wall built along the Mexican border for twenty years.  I never really had much hope for it.  Now I have none at all.

There are basically two arguments against building that wall:  the first is that it won’t work; the second is that it will.  And I have even heard some people advance both reasons without any sense of inconsistency.  One minute we hear that people will just use ladders to get over the wall, and the next minute we hear that it is cruel and inhumane to keep people out.

My view is that a wall, properly manned and monitored, would work, and that while I feel sorry for the people trying to get into this country, I still don’t want to let them in for the same reason that I don’t want a homeless person sleeping on my couch.  I am just not that good.

I am willing to concede that I may be mistaken as to the effectiveness of a wall in stopping illegal immigration.  And if someone wants to accuse me of being selfish and heartless for wanting a wall, I will concede that point as well.  The question that concerns me at the moment is not whether my desire to have a wall built along the southern border proves either that I am a fool or a knave, possibly both, but whether it proves that I am a racist.

It’s all Donald Trump’s fault, of course.  In the commentary of late about Donald Trump’s racism, several examples are typically put forward as evidence.  First, there was his remark that most of the people coming here from Mexico are rapists, drug dealers, and assorted criminals.  Second, there is his advocacy of a ban on Muslims.  Third, there is his claim that the judge presiding over his case is prejudiced against him on account of his Mexican heritage.

One might quibble over whether these things are racism or some other kind of prejudice.  For example, the ban on Muslims I would call religious discrimination, because Muslims do not constitute a race.  On the other hand, since it is now fashionable to say that race is just a social construct, I suppose we could socially construct Muslims as a race if we wanted to.  For that matter, we might even simplify things by socially constructing the race of illegal immigrants, regardless of their national origin, skin color, or physiognomy.  People sneaking into this country from Mexico, Syria, Thailand, and Nigeria would all be of the same race, the race of illegal immigrants.  Then, anyone opposing illegal immigration would be a racist.  But we all know that race is more than just a social construct, and that socially constructing a race of illegal immigrants as outlined above would be just plain silly.

Therefore, I do not wish to quibble about whether Trump’s remarks are racist or just some other kind of prejudice or discrimination.  Let us, for the sake of simplicity, stipulate that Trump’s remarks are racist and that Donald Trump says these things because he is a racist.  What bothers me is that in addition to the examples mentioned above as proof of Trump’s racism, his desire to build a wall is listed right along with them.  Now, it is one thing to say that Donald Trump wants to build a wall because he is a racist.  It is quite another thing to say that someone is a racist because he wants to build a wall.  Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John McCain have all supported the idea of building a wall at one time or another.  Are they racists?  Or rather, were they racists at the time but no longer?

Whatever their reasons were for a change of heart, or at least a change of position, I can guarantee they will never be in support of a wall again.  There probably never was much chance for a wall before Trump declared his desire to become president.  Now there is no chance at all.  The idea of a wall will forever have the Donald Trump taint, and no future politician with aspirations to become president will want to have anything to do with it.

Somewhere in Time (1980)

In just about any time travel movie you have ever seen, science and technology are involved somehow.  Never mind exactly what that scientific explanation is for time travel or what the technological gadget is that makes it possible, because it’s all a bunch of hooey anyway.  We go along with it not because we believe for one second that such a thing is possible, but because we are willing to suspend disbelief for the sake of a good story.  So we know we are in for a different kind of time travel movie when the man that advises Richard Collier (Christopher Reeve) about traveling through time is a philosophy professor.

According to the philosophy professor, if you want to go back in time, you have to think really hard about the period of time to which you wish to go, while making sure there is nothing in the room that will remind you of the present, such as a recently minted coin.  In particular, if Collier wants to go back to August, 1912, he must think August, 1912.  It reminded me of Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man (1962) telling the students who just got their new musical instruments that they don’t need to learn how to read music or the technique of playing the instruments they now own.  They just need to “Think the Minuet.”

Collier wants to go back to 1912 because that is when a woman lived with whom he fell in love while looking at her picture.  Now, if you can’t find a woman to fall in love with in the time period in which you exist, you have problems that a time machine can’t solve.  But that aside, it all started when that woman, Elise McKenna (Jane Seymour), now very old, gave him a watch and said, “Come back to me,” and then walked away.  Why she didn’t stick around and tell him to read the professor’s book on time travel and to “think 1912,” we do not know.  And what is going on between them in general, we do not know.  Of course, there is some kind of meant-for-each-other destiny involved, maybe with a little reincarnation thrown in, but it’s hard to tell, because the movie never makes that clear.

I know what it is like to be in love, but if I managed to travel back in time just by thinking about it, I would not be able to contain myself.  I would have to sit in a chair and contemplate the implications of something I had heretofore thought impossible.  Love would just have to wait.  On the other hand, if I did catch up with the woman in question, I would have to blurt out, “I fell in love with your picture, so I came back from the future to be with you.  If you don’t believe me, just take a look at this penny.  Oops!”

Finally, because Collier fell asleep while he was thinking 1912, we are never sure whether he just dreamed it or not.  In fact, at the end of the movie, he seems to be in a catatonic trance.  So, maybe what we just watched was the hallucination of a loony.  In fact, that really is the only way to make any sense out of this movie.

Martyrs of the Alamo (1915)

As we know, The Birth of a Nation (1915), directed by D.W. Griffith, justifies the institution of slavery and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction as the need to protect white women from Negro lust.  Later that year, Griffith also produced Martyrs of the Alamo, which reveals that the war in which Texas declared and won its independence from Mexico was brought about by Mexican lust for white women.  So many white women were being accosted by the Mexican soldiers, it seems, that the white men finally had to take up arms to protect them.  When Santa Anna and his troops come in to put down the rebellion, the Texians took refuge in the Alamo, and we all know what happened next.

As an example of how cruel and ruthless the Mexican soldiers are, we see a scene in which a little boy is bayonetted, his body picked up and flung out of the way.  And when the battle is over, Santa Anna has anyone that survived the massacre executed, except for good-looking white women, of course.  We see an old woman being taken away for execution, while a young, pretty blonde is spared.  The intertitle notes that Santa Anna is an inveterate drug fiend known for his shameless orgies.  Right after that, we see him grabbing the pretty blonde, but she slaps him and gets away from him.  By the way, Santa Anna is played by Walter Long, the same man that played Gus in The Birth of a Nation, the black man that tried to rape Flora.

We have all heard how the Mexican soldiers were caught off guard when Sam Houston attacked at San Jacinto because they were taking their siesta.  But in addition to that, according to this movie, Santa Anna, appearing somewhat stoned, is busy having women dance for him, while a Mexican guard watches the show himself instead of watching for such things as an advancing army of Texians.  So, Mexican lust not only was the cause of the Texas revolution, it was also the cause of Mexico’s defeat as well.

The Lies That No One Believes

The main purpose of a lie is to deceive.  And thus it is only natural to suppose that a lie will fail to accomplish its purpose if the person being lied to does not believe it.  There is a certain species of lie, however, that manages to be successful even though it is not believed and the liar has no expectation that it will be.  A good example would be that in which a husband emphatically insists to his wife that he has not been cheating on her even though she knows he has.  Another would be the man who declares under oath that he does not remember something he could not possibly have forgotten.   And an excellent example was provided recently by President Obama when he stated, “We are determined to realize a world free of nuclear weapons.”

Now, by way of contrast, just imagine if Obama had said, in a very different context, “We are determined to realize a nation free of handguns.”  Such a remark would have caused a frenzy of political backlash by defenders of gun ownership, and that for two reasons:  First, they would believe that Obama really meant it had he said such a thing; and second, they would believe that he might actually take steps to try to bring it about.  After all, we have been reading for some time in the right-wing hysterical press that Obama is coming for our guns, causing gun sales to skyrocket.  If the Republicans really believed Obama when he said he wanted to get rid of nuclear weapons, the uproar would be overwhelming.  Donald Trump is presently accusing Hillary Clinton of wanting to abolish the Second Amendment.  But we don’t hear him saying that Hillary, like President Obama, wants to get rid of nuclear weapons. Trump believes a lot of crazy things, but he is not crazy enough to believe that.

Obama does not believe there will ever be a world free of nuclear weapons.  Furthermore, he knows that we do not believe him when he says that we need to rid the world of nuclear weapons.  In fact, it is because this lie is told with no expectation of its being taken seriously that it is bipartisan.  Ronald Reagan said pretty much the same thing in his 1985 inaugural address, and no one believed him either, nor did he expect them to.

The truth is, the world is a better place with nuclear weapons, but no politician dares to say so.  Without nuclear weapons, the world have undoubtedly fought a major war sometime in the last seventy years on a par with World Wars I and II.  “World War III” has always been understood to mean a war where America’s and Russia’s hydrogen bombs are unleashed.  But a conventional World War III would have undoubtedly been fought by now, possibly on American soil with widespread devastation, had not the existence of nuclear weapons kept such hostilities in check.  Who knows?  We might even have lost that war and our whole way of life with it.

Let’s face it.  To utter the truth, which is that we have no intention of ever giving up our arsenal, but we want to keep other countries from enjoying all the benefits of possessing nuclear weapons, would be a crude assertion of the will to power.  Instead, presidents are obliged to say that all nuclear weapons are bad, even ours, and that we look forward to the day when there are no more nuclear weapons in this world.  No one believes us, of course.  But this lie must be functional in some way, or presidents would not keep saying it.

A similar kind of lie was told by the Bush administration regarding plans to build a missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic to protect them from an attack from Iran.  You see, if Iran is ever able to develop long-range missiles with nuclear warheads, they will send those missiles flying right over Israel and hit the countries of Eastern Europe, because Poles and Czechs are the ones they really want to destroy.  Needless to say, the Russians did not believe this lie.  Putin knew that plans for the missile shield were being made with Russia in mind.  The American people did not believe that lie.  Our allies did not believe it.  And the Iranians just snorted.  Moreover, George W. Bush had no expectation that anyone would believe it.  I mean, our opinion of Bush’s intellect may be pretty low, but we know he was not stupid enough to expect anyone to swallow that whopper.  And yet, the lie must have been functional in some way or else his administration would not have bothered to insist on telling it.

In part, the functionality of such lies is akin to religious utterances like “He’s gone to a better place” and polite expressions such as “We’ll have to get together sometime.”  We know they are baloney, but somehow they make us feel better anyway.  But another function of the lie no one believes is that it stops things from proceeding to the next step.  If you insist on a lie, no one can make you confront the truth and all its implications.

“Of All the Gin Joints….”

You know what the problem with this universe is?

It has too much synchronicity in it.

First, had any other Republican won the nomination, he or she would probably have stayed away from Bill Clinton’s sexual misconduct.  Instead, we have Donald Trump, who is willing to bring up every scandal connected with the Clintons, especially the ones involving sex.

Second, Bill Cosby has just been told he will have to stand trial for raping a woman by drugging her first, which naturally reminds people about the sexual assault charges made against Bill Clinton, as underscored by Steve Kornacki.

Third, we now have this scandal concerning Ken Starr for his failure to handle sexual assault cases properly as president of Baylor University.  Ken Starr, of course, was the man that investigated Bill Clinton during his presidency.

The occurrence of these three things all about the same time is too significant to be just a coincidence.  It must be synchronicity, that mysterious, meaningful connection between causally unrelated events.

Now, we also have the State Department’s report on Hillary’s improper use of emails, but that doesn’t count, not because sex is not involved, but because there is a causal process that led to this report’s being released at this time.  It’s a problem for Hillary, of course, but we cannot call it a coincidence.

Nor does the documentary Weiner count either.  It will remind us of how Anthony Weiner took pictures of his genitals and sent them to adoring women, which reminds us of his wife, Huma Abedin, the assistant to Hillary Clinton, but a causal analysis can explain why this documentary is being released at this time, so there is no need to invoke synchronicity.

Some might argue that Donald Trump’s attempt to smear Hillary with the scandals of the past will not work, especially the one about Vince Foster.  In fact, it might be argued that by bringing up Vince Foster, the one scandal most people, left and right, are willing to dismiss as a crazy conspiracy theory, Trump is actually undermining the other charges he has leveled against her and her husband.  And others might argue that the scandal concerning Ken Starr undermines his credibility as an investigator of various Clinton scandals.

But just as synchronicity is coincidence between meaningful events not causally connected, so too is the association of ideas a meaningful connection between thoughts not connected by logic.  Logic and causation don’t matter.  True, false, justified, unjustified, fair or foul—it doesn’t matter.  It all adds up to that queasy feeling we get when we think about the Clintons being back in the White House.

I am not given to spooky theories like those involving Carl Jung’s concept of synchronicity or to similar notions of luck or fate, but there are times when it seems that events not causally connected come together in a way that mere coincidence could not possibly support.  And right now, Hillary must be wondering how Donald Trump, Bill Cosby, and Ken Starr have all managed to come together by mere chance, just months away from the presidential election.